Monthly Archives: September 2013

Well, all good things must come to end, and today is the end of Tolkien Week 2013. I must say that I’ve enjoyed making all of these LotR-themed posts, and I hope that you have enjoyed reading them.

It is sad that we must bid farewell to this, one of the best weeks of the year, but I figured we may as well end on a high note. So today’s post is a clip of “The Cat and the Moon” from the Lord of the Rings musical, which is a very fast-paced, energetic song that involves dancing hobbits.

Much like with the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, I find that I can’t let Tolkien Week pass without posting Sam’s speech from The Two Towers. In my opinion, it’s one of the greatest speeches of all time, and it also gives us a beautiful description of why The Lord of the Rings strikes such a resonant chord with so many people.

Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam.

Sam: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are.

It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?

Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.

So for today’s Tolkien Week post, I decided to go with “The Song of the Lonely Mountain” as performed by the dwarves in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. This song was easily one of my favorite parts of the movie, and I liked how the music throughout the rest of the movie contained this melody and wove it into the story. For, indeed, the dwarves’ song of their homeland is crucial to the story. It woke the desire for adventure in Bilbo as well as letting the audience know precisely what this quest meant for Thorin and his friends.

I find that no matter what I post for Tolkien Week, I always have to include this clip. It shows the Rohirrim at their finest, and it’s just plain epic. In my opinion, it’s one of the finest battle scenes ever filmed and has some of the most stirring fight music ever. It may be even more iconic than the “Amok Time” fight music from Star Trek, but we’ll have to wait several years yet to see if that happens.

So I was looking for Tolkien videos on YouTube to share with all of you since it’s Tolkien Week…and then I found this. It’s an audio clip of Tolkien singing “Chip the Glasses and Crack the Plates” from The Hobbit. Now you’ll notice the tune is nothing like the one in the recently-released movie, but I like it all the better for that. It’s sung by the man who actually wrote the song, so if anyone knows how it should sound, it’s him.

Be warned, though–you might die a little from happiness after listening to it.

Today’s Tolkien Week post is a song from the London musical version of Lord of the Rings (which was totally awesome and needs to come back). This particular piece, “The Road Goes On”, was adapted from a song that featured quite prominently in the book, “The Road Goes Ever on and On”. It’s an uplifting, happy song that showcases how the hobbits felt as they first started out on their journey. They knew that darkness was ahead, but it wasn’t upon them yet, so in the meantime they might as well enjoy the trip.

Granted, the Nazgul eventually show up and ruin the fun, but at least the hobbits got to have some lighthearted moments before the storm broke.